DISABLED BODIES AND GOD'S GLORY

I’m currently reading a book called My Body is not a Prayer Request by Amy Kenny. In particular, I’m interested in her discussion of John 9. If you’re not familiar with John 9, it is the story in John’s gospel of the man born blind who is never given a name and whose story takes up the entire chapter. The disciples are out walking with Jesus when they meet the man born blind. They ask Jesus what who sinned, the man or his parents, that he was born blind. Jesus says neither it is to show the glory of God.

I have always thought that that was to show how great God is that he could cure people and heal people, in this case cure people of physical ailments. This interpretation is understandable because Jesus does in fact go on to cure the man of his blindness. However, this author makes a point that astonishes me and I hope it astonishes you. Actually, I hope it doesn’t astonish you because it points to ableism in our society and in ourselves, even in those of us who are in some way disabled.

Before I go any further if you don’t know what ableism is, it is the discrimination or unconscious bias against disabled people in our society. The point this author makes is that disabled bodies do in fact exhibit the glory of God every bit as much as abled bodies do. We don’t think of a dog or a cat or other animals that have what we could say defects, we don’t consider them less than and yet in our society we definitely consider disabled people as second class. In order to receive government assistance – which is difficult to get in the first place – they have to follow many rules. Rules against getting married, rules about how much they can own, rules about many, many things. It’s abominable.

But the point I want to focus on is this idea that disabled bodies reflect the glory of God. To quote Jesus quoting John, ““Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” That God’s works might be revealed in him doesn’t necessarily refer to God’s healing works. It could refer to the works that this man himself will perform or even just that all of us reveal the glory of God in our being. That astonishes me because I do have ableist thinking, because I was raised in a society full of ableist thinking and it’s difficult to get rid of some of it, even when I myself am a disabled person.

So, I’m going to sit with that this week as I continue to read this fantastic book, and I invite you to do the same. Let’s together think of ways that this statement that disabled bodies reflect the glory of God astonishes us, and why that astonishes us, and maybe even think of the ways that disabled bodies reflect God’s glory.

B

 

 

PSALM 88

If you, like me, are very unsettled in the chaos that the Supreme Court and Republican legislatures and Republican leadership are creating, I think you might find Psalm 88 very helpful. It is the one and only Psalm out of 150 that has no good resolution. It doesn't end with praise for God nor does God respond to the Psalmist. The Psalmist just continues and continues and continues to pray to God, even trying to plead with God that dead people can’t praise him. Hint, hint.

I however find it very hopeful, because there’s also no indication whatsoever that the Psalmist has run out of hope, that there’s any reason to not hope because God is silent. And I also understand that Jewish people prayed this Psalm particularly during the holocaust. Because it seemed God was silent. And today, and for the past seven years, I have felt that God has been silent. It just seems like one disaster after another. So, coming upon it in the Revised Common Lectionary was providential this morning.

I have written before about how late I came to understand racism and systemic poverty and all the things that intersect to create the chaos we’re seeing today. Part of the reason for this blog is to admit my fault and to spread the word in any way I can. It’s my mea culpa. It’s also about spreading the knowledge any way I can about that, but also about how we can resist and how we can create hope and create power and love God and each other. In fact, all those things happen at the same time. I’ll probably be writing more next time about that, but for today, I want to leave you not just with Psalm 88 as a prayer resource but also with a Buddhist prayer practice that I’ve been doing since Trump became the Republican nominee for president in 2016.

And it goes like this: we begin by taking a few breaths to center ourselves, to come to a place of calm. This time can be long or short. Once centered, we pray for four things. Those four things are happiness, freedom from suffering, God’s joy, and peace, if you like you can think of it as the peace of Christ. And we pray for those four things for five people. Those five people are in order: ourselves, someone very dear to us, someone a little further away, someone who might annoy us, and finally we pray for someone who might be our enemy.

As an example, I would say may I enjoy happiness, may my spouse enjoy happiness, may a family member, say my sister, enjoy happiness, may someone at church who might annoy me enjoy happiness, and may … well I don’t know SCOTUS or Trump or Republican leadership, you pick … enjoy happiness. And then I would go on to pray for freedom from suffering for each of those five people, followed by praying for us never to be separated from God’s joy, followed by a prayer that we all might dwell in God‘s peace.

Now, it’s going to be hard if you try this. You might not mean it at first. I did not. In fact, it just made me angry for a long time. But I’m here to say that I have come to see these people who are clearly enemies to the American way of life, (they are clearly enemies to women and trans people and lesbian people, Black people, people of color, immigrants, disabled people, etc.) I’ve come to see them not as enemies … ok, I still see them as enemies … but more I’ve come to see how lost they are.

And I can relate to being lost. I don’t know if you can. But I have been as lost as they are. I have made decisions that hurt people, just like they’re doing, out of my confusion and anger and frustration and trying to get to a better place in life. And I can see how I was headed directly toward where these people are. And because of that, I don’t want to think of them as monsters or call them names or dehumanize them, because that would’ve hurt me deeply when I was in that space.

I think we’re all lost in our own ways, and that’s really the message I have today. Although we need to resist and we need to fight back and we need to do whatever we can wherever we are to stop this madness, I think we need to try to do it without losing sight of the fact that we are all people.

And that’s probably a hard thing to hear today.

If so, I recommend Psalm 88.

May it fill you with peace and God’s comfort today.

CURSES!

 We’re at the final part of Genesis 2-3. In the previous posts, we’ve enjoyed God creating the human and the garden for him to live in. We’ve enjoyed seeing how focused God is on the human (and us!). We’ve seen God perform surgery and create a partner fit for the man. We’ve seen the snake trick Eve, or maybe we’ve seen Eve act wisely. Either way, the people eat the apple and realize they are naked, which while it didn’t matter before, matters now – they’ve eaten the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. Nakedness is clearly bad in this story. Since they realize this is shameful, they cover their private parts with fig leaves. And when God comes to the garden in the evening, their shame causes them to hide.

God finds them out while walking in the garden. He calls to them because he can’t find them like usual. They admit they hid because they were naked. God asked them who told them they were naked. God asks, but she already knows; her next question is, “did you eat of the tree which I had forbidden you to eat from?” The man, of course, minimizes his responsibility for his own actions by blaming the woman. “She gave it to me and I ate it.” Ignoring the fact that he heard the entire conversation between the serpent and the woman and didn’t protest or object to her action in any way. God turns to the woman and asks, “what is this you have done?” Here’s where Eve is not so awesome. She too downplays her own guilt (symbolized by her thinking it through!) and says the snake tricked her. 

Image Credit: https://uploads0.wikiart.org/images/michelangelo/adam-and-eve-1512.jpg!PinterestSmall.jpg

(Far be it from me to critique Michelangelo, but this image is incorrect. That snake has no legs …)

Now comes the most awesome and the most beautiful part of this whole story. First, remember the snake still has legs, but its about to lose them. God curses the snake as a consequence of its actions. “On your belly you shall crawl. You’ll be more cursed than all the beasts of the field and all the cattle. I will put enmity between you and the woman. You will always be enemies.” And to the woman he says, “because you’ve done this, I’m going to make childbearing really hard on you and sometimes it will kill you. However, you will still want your husband and he will rule over you.” The woman herself is not cursed – whether you think of pain in childbirth as a curse or not.

Then, God says to the man, “cursed be the ground because of you.” Cursed be the ground because you ate of the tree. The man himself is not cursed. But the ground is cursed. People will have to work harder for our living now. They will have to earn a living “by the sweat of their brows.”

This does not seem awesome and beautiful. Not yet; it’s coming!

To recap, the snake and the ground are cursed outright. The people are not cursed. The woman will have pains in childbearing, but that’s not the same as outright saying “You’ll be more cursed than all the beasts of the field!” The ground itself is not even really cursed either, just for the man. It’s hard to look out on a beautiful day like Cleveland has today and say, “Oh this is all cursed!” It’s equally hard to see new babies and people and say they are cursed. My point is this: we are not living under a curse. And God has definitely not cursed us.

Was that the awesome part? Yes! Part of it anyway.

Now, we come to the final section of the parable and the whole point. The parable answers the burning question of why snakes don’t have legs. Where did all the people and plants and trees come from. What was the beginning like? Specifically, where did people come from? Why are men and women different? Again, it answers the question of why people, plants, and animals all die. Of course, we don’t like it when our loved ones die. We want to know why and how to stop it. This section answers the question of why life is so hard; farming is hard and childbearing is hard. So much work! Most importantly, it gave people a story to tell about themselves and their ancestors. It gave them a story to bring them together as a people, as all the best stories do.

But the best part is that God continues to care for them and to love them even though they’ve disobeyed his one commandment. God says they can’t stay here, because now they’re going to die and only things that aren’t going to die can live in Eden.

How is this caring for them? It’s coming.

Because they were ashamed to be naked, God herself sews them clothes from animal skins to protect them when they leave the garden. God made them clothes! In previous installments, I talked about how intimately God is woven with them; He is focused on them and their comfort and this continues even after they leave the garden. To me, it’s so delightful to see just how focused and pleased God is with what She’s created. It’s delightful to see God’s care and compassion for them and for us!

Maybe we too are called to realize how intimately we are connected to God and to each other, to be focused on and care for each other in the way that God is focused on us. The Poor People’s Campaign had an assembly in Washington DC over the weekend. My spouse was there and I stayed and watched from home. The assembly gave one person from each state time to share how government policy has killed their family members or made their lives unnecessarily harder. We in the crowd were asked to listen. Just that. Listen. In fact, the Rev. Dr. William Barber II admonished the crowd several times to stop speaking while the speakers were speaking. Because we need to listen to each other as a sign that we care about each other.

It is only by listening to the pain and heartbreak of the oppressed that we learn how to partner with them to make a better world.

Go forth and listen.

B

NAKED BEFORE GOD

Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. The immediate effect is that they realize they are naked. And, somehow, they realize this is bad or shameful. So, they sew fig leaves together to cover their parts. Have you ever seen fig leaves? They can be huge – up to 10 inches long and seven inches wide.

Anyway, later that day – in the cool of the evening – God comes walking in the garden. Because they ate the fruit, they know they’ve done something bad and are ashamed. The text says they’re ashamed because they’re naked. Anyway, they do what we’ve all done as kids, hopefully not as adults. They hide. I’m not sure what the strategy is there, but God notices. He calls out to them. Well, to the man, because patriarchy.

Adam responds that he’s afraid to face God because he’s naked.

Naked.

There are so many ways to be naked: physically, emotionally, exposed for a lie we’ve told, vulnerable to another, spiritually. In all these there’s a sense of vulnerability. Adam is vulnerable before God – and now he knows it. He doesn’t like it. He’s afraid of what God might do. Adam is a lot like us here. Especially in America. We don’t like feeling vulnerable or helpless before another person.

But the truth is that we’re all naked before God. That’s why some of us don’t go near her. It’s too painful. Because to get close to God implies getting to know and admit the truth about ourselves. Most of us, when thinking about this, focus on the negative truths about ourselves. We’ve been taught to – not by any one person, but rather by our society’s institutions. Our society is a little broken that way.

Jesus doesn’t focus on our brokenness. When he called the disciples, he didn’t tell them he’d fix their personal faults. No, he told them to follow him. He told a few he’d teach them how to fish for people. He gained disciples by inviting himself to a meal, by recognizing repentance in the woman with the alabaster jar, by healing those who wanted to be healed in order to rejoin their community. Jesus gained disciples by loving them.

God is not watching us because she is tallying up our wrongs. She watches us as a father watches his newborn: in awe, wonder, and love.

It’s been a rough week, a rough month for gun violence in America. Most of us want something to be done and feel powerless when our leaders only offer “horrified and heartbroken,” which is the replacement for the much-mocked “thoughts and prayers.” I mean, we are all horrified and heartbroken. But our leaders seem to think that words are enough.

They are not.

So, maybe stay close to God, Jesus, the Spirit. They see us in love. Maybe rest there. That’s my plan. Because when I fill up on love, I can then spread it to others – in the form of actions as well as words. 

It sounds corny, because it is, but what the world needs now is love.

B